fidelity of their loves! Let us add,
however,--to be entirely just--that these touching demonstrations of
society, fraternity, and love of neighbor, do not prevent the animals
from quarrelling, fighting, and outrageously abusing one another while
gaining their livelihood and showing their gallantry; the resemblance
between them and ourselves is perfect.

The social instinct, in man and beast, exists to a greater or less
degree--its nature is the same. Man has the greater need of association,
and employs it more; the animal seems better able to endure isolation.
In man, social needs are more imperative and complex; in the beast, they
seem less intense, less diversified, less regretted. Society, in a
word, aims, in the case of man, at the preservation of the race and
the individual; with the animals, its object is more exclusively the
preservation of the race.

As yet, we have met with no claim which man can make for himself alone.
The social instinct and the moral sense he shares with the brutes; and
when he thinks to become god-like by a few acts of charity, justice,
and devotion, he does not perceive that in so acting he simply obeys an
instinct wholly animal in its nature. As we are good, loving, tender,
just, so we are passionate, greedy, lewd, and vindictive; that is, we
are like the beasts. Our highest virtues appear, in the last analysis,
as blind, impulsive instincts. What subjects for canonization and
apotheosis!

There is, however, a difference between us two-handed bipeds and other
living creatures--what is it?

A student of philosophy would hasten to reply: "This difference lies in
the fact that we are conscious of our social faculty, while the animals
are unconscious of theirs--in the fact that while we reflect and reason
upon the operation of our social instinct, the animals do nothing of the
kind."

I will go farther. It is by our reflective and reasoning powers,
with which we seem to be exclusively endowed, that we know that it is
injurious, first to others and then to ourselves, to resist the social
instinct which governs us, and which we call JUSTICE. It is our reason
which teaches us that the selfish man, the robber, the murderer--in a
word, the traitor to society--sins against Nature, and is guilty with
respect to others and himself, when he does wrong wilfully. Finally, it
is our social sentiment on the one hand, and our reason on the
other, which cause us to think that beings such as we shoul